


Five Time Liam Doesn’t Ask (And One Time Zayn Doesn’t Tell)

by luxover



Category: One Direction (Band)
Genre: GENERATION KILL AU, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-10-28
Updated: 2012-10-28
Packaged: 2017-11-17 05:40:28
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,031
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/548203
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/luxover/pseuds/luxover
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>It’s a few months later; Liam’s a Team Leader with Bravo One in Kuwait, just waiting for orders to head into Iraq, and Zayn’s his RTO. They’re friends now—brothers, even—and although Liam still wants what he wants, it still doesn’t matter because he still can’t ask Zayn if he’d maybe—if he’d ever want to.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Five Time Liam Doesn’t Ask (And One Time Zayn Doesn’t Tell)

**Author's Note:**

> Written for and prompted by the ever-wonderful [shoreparty](http://shoreparty.livejournal.com/) over at a [prompt post on lj.](http://luxover.livejournal.com/26577.html)

i.  
  
Liam meets him in Afghanistan.  
  
“Hey,” Liam says to the lump sleeping underneath a cammie net. When the Corporal doesn’t move, he says it again, “Hey,” and nudges him with the tip of his boot.  
  
“Whazzat?” the Corporal says, and he sits up, looks at Liam through sleepy, half-lidded eyes. Liam looks back at him and he almost can’t breathe; Corporal Malik is young, with full lips and smooth skin, and Liam has to ball his hands into fists just to keep from reaching out and touching him.  
  
“Corporal Malik? Lieutenant Higgins sent me,” Liam says instead of doing or saying anything he actually wants. It’s so hot out that he feels like he’s covered head to toe in sweat, and he can’t remember the last time he had a shower. Liam knows how he looks—tired, dirty, anxious—and he knows how Corporal Malik looks—young, beautiful, perfect—and even if they weren’t where they were, Liam wouldn’t stand a chance. “He needs help with some radios.”  
  
“It’s Zayn,” Corporal Malik says. “And yeah, yeah, I’m coming.”  
  
“Great,” Liam says, and he nods once, watches as Zayn crawls out from underneath the netting and shrugs the suspenders of his MOPP suit up over his shoulders. Liam starts to wonder why they were down in the first place, and he almost asks before he catches himself. He needs to stop thinking that way.  
  
“Yeah,” Corporal Malik says, and he runs a hand through his hair. “See you, Sergeant Payne.”  
  
Liam has to tell himself more than once that he won’t spend the rest of the day wondering why Zayn knows who he is.  
  
  
ii.  
  
It’s a few months later; Liam’s a Team Leader with Bravo One in Kuwait, just waiting for orders to head into Iraq, and Zayn’s his RTO. They’re friends now—brothers, even—and although Liam still wants what he wants, it still doesn’t matter because he still can’t ask Zayn if he’d maybe—if he’d ever want to.  
  
“Do you think Harry’s hot?” Niall asks Louis. Louis’s some reporter there to cover the war, writes for GQ and Rolling Stone and tons of other magazines that Liam doesn’t read. He’s alright, though; makes the rest of his Humvee laugh a lot, and Liam likes him for that.   
  
“I—what?” Louis asks, and he’s smiling just a little, looking between Niall and Harry like he doesn’t understand the joke.  
  
“It doesn’t make you gay if you think Harry’s hot,” Niall continues. “We all think he’s hot.”  
  
“It’s the dimples,” Zayn says lazily, and he fiddles with a stove on the floor in front of him.   
  
“It’s my winning personality,” Harry corrects, and he smiles wide, shows off his dimples. Niall darts a hand out and pinches one of Harry’s cheeks hard, and Harry lets out a yelp. “Ah, fuck, don’t do that!”  
  
They start bickering, tossing out insults without a second thought, and Louis laughs along, writing down the better one-liners to print later on. Zayn turns his head and looks at Liam for a second, just looks at him, and Liam opens his mouth to ask him why he’s staring.  
  
“I thought we raised them better than this,” Zayn says before Liam gets to say anything, and Liam’s chest tightens so much that he has to look away.  
  
  
iii.  
  
Harry fires his weapon on Liam’s say-so and accidentally hits a camel and a kid. The camel’s dead, almost irrelevant, and so they do what they can to get the medical attention the kid needs. The LT does what he can when there’s not much left that they can do, but Liam’s still being investigated, and things could be better.

Liam hides out under the Humvee for a while after that, scraping the caked sand and crud out from the underbelly and around the axl, and he leaves his MRE where Harry placed it, next to him in the dirt.  
  
Zayn comes around sundown, lies down in the dirt with him, and whether he drew the short straw or came of his own volition, Liam doesn’t know. What Liam  _does_  know is that Zayn lies there, his head turned to the side and his face just inches from Liam’s, and their shoulders touch.   
  
“My band opened up for Ed Sheeran once,” Zayn says. “I mean, the band I was in before I joined up. We were good, but. I don’t know. Maybe I wasn’t doing it with the right people, I don’t know.”  
  
Liam pauses in what he’s doing for a minute, but he doesn’t say anything, and then goes back to scraping and pounding away at the crud. A kid might die because of him, and now his job is on the line, and Liam can’t breathe, almost can’t even think.  
  
“Can I do anything?” Zayn asks.  
  
And Liam wants to say,  _What do you want from me?_  but what comes out is, “Can you make sure Harry’s okay?”  
  
It takes Zayn a second to respond, but when he does, he says, “Yeah. Of course, yeah,” and then he’s getting up, moving away, and Liam lies there.  
  
  
iv.  
  
The accidents don’t start or end with Harry; Niall stops sleeping—doesn’t get any shuteye for three, maybe four days, Liam doesn’t know—and he ends up pulling the trigger too early at a road block. Even half-delirious, Niall gets the driver right through the left eye, and then he checks out.

“The car kept coming,” he explains to Liam, but he looks so exhausted, like he doesn’t even know where he is. “They didn’t stop; they just kept coming.”  
  
And then he stops talking.  
  
They go about a day and a half, maybe a bit more, and the LT has Niall write up his report, and they all try to get Niall to smile again. Louis jokes that he’ll help Niall out during a combat jack, if he wants, and then Harry squawks that he won’t let Louis cheat on him like that, and Zayn just places his hand on the back of Niall’s neck, rubs his thumb through the bottom edge of Niall’s hair.  
  
It doesn’t work.  
  
So Liam seeks him out one night after they’ve all eaten, when the others are goofing around on quarter watch, and the two of them sit there, staring at the Iraqi skyline with their arms looped loosely around their knees.  
  
Liam hands him an extra pound cake MRE, and Niall doesn’t quite smile, but his lips quirk up just a fraction as he takes it. And that’s really all Liam came for, to give Niall the pound cake, but now that he’s done that and nothing’s been fixed, he doesn’t feel like he can leave. He’s the Team Leader; he’s supposed to be able to fix things.  
  
“After that thing with Harry and the camel,” Liam says, not mentioning the kid even though that’s really what he’s talking about, “Zayn found me under the Humvee. And he was talking about his band—which explains his terrible microphone tattoo, I guess—and he said something about how maybe it’s not what you do, but who you do it with.”  
  
“I shot that guy,” Niall says. He doesn’t look at Liam. “Doesn’t matter who I was with; I was the one that did it.”  
  
“I know,” Liam says. “But this is a war, and if you have to make mistakes, I guess it’s best to do it with us, ‘cause we’ve got your six through everything.”  
  
Niall nods for a second, but it doesn’t look like he’s going to respond. And that’s it, that’s all Liam’s got, but at least he tried. He’s just about to get up and give Niall his space when Niall says, “You and Zayn are close, huh?”  
  
And Liam thinks,  _Close?_  He doesn’t know what Niall means by that. Liam’s been careful, hasn’t said a thing about all the things he feels for Zayn, but if Niall knows something, or thinks he knows something—  
  
“Wouldn’t have anyone else driving my Humvee,” Liam says. He knocks shoulders with Niall. “Or standing up in the turret.”   
  
Niall’s smile is so, so small, but for Liam it carries the weight of the world.  
  
  
v.  
  
They make it to the cigarette factory, all five of them in one piece, and they jump at the chance to play a bit of football in the empty space.  
  
Harry is awful, absolutely awful, and Niall laughs at him every time he messes up, his laugh loud and bright. It’s Louis’s last day with them, but everyone pretends that it’s not as he covers Harry’s ears with both his hands and says, “Don’t listen to them, the ball just went a bit wobbly because of, you know, wind speed and atmospheric pressure and stuff.”  
  
“It’s just,” Harry says, shaking Louis’s hands off his head, “with my knowledge and understanding of the football game, I should be a lot better at football.”  
  
Liam feels like he should step back and enjoy this, like he should commit this to memory, because they’re in the middle of Iraq, alive and happy, and that doesn’t happen often, if at all. But Zayn’s there, shirtless and passing the football back and forth between his two hands, and that’s what Liam commits to memory instead, the way Zayn’s chest looks in the sunlight and how the tips of his shoulders are beginning to turn pink.  
  
Zayn says he’s not re-upping, and Liam knows why, knows that Zayn has too much going for him to stick with this, but he still wants to ask Zayn, wants to hear it in his own words.  
  
“Vas happening?” Zayn asks from where he is. He’s smiling just enough to show teeth, and Liam wants to kiss his mouth.  
  
“Nothing,” Liam says, and he smiles back.  
  
  
i.  
  
Everyone’s there at Zayn’s paddle party, most of Bravo and some guys from Alpha, and even though the LT got out the week before, he shows up and tries to get them to call him Paul.  
  
“The end of an era,” Niall says. “We’re either gonna have to get a new driver or just never go anywhere.”  
  
“So basically, we’re not going anywhere,” Harry says, and Zayn laughs at that, the kind of laugh that says that he’s going to miss them, but not enough to stay.  
  
Liam almost can’t stand it, and so he heads into the kitchen under the guise of getting more water. He stands there at the sink and lets the cold water run over his hands, his bare wrists, and wonders how often he’ll be able to call Zayn, or visit him, before it starts to look like too much, like more than what it is.  
  
“Hey,” Zayn says, and Liam turns around. He hadn’t even heard Zayn walk up.  
  
“Hey,” Liam says back. “How’s freedom taste?”  
  
Zayn shrugs and says, “It’s alright.” And then, fiddling with the label of his beer, he says, “Since I may never see you again, I just wanted to say that—I mean—I’m just glad that you were my Team Leader.”  
  
“Better than being stuck with Cardle,” Liam jokes. “We’re gonna miss you.  _I’m_  gonna miss you.”  
  
And maybe there’s something written on his face that Liam doesn’t realize, but Zayn smiles at that and then leans in and kisses Liam softly on the mouth. When he pulls away, barely a second later, he looks nervous, and Liam doesn’t know why. He pulls Zayn back by the front of his shirt and kisses him again, right there in the kitchen, with tongue and teeth and his hands bracketing Zayn’s hips.  
  
There’s the sound of glass breaking back in the living room, and that shakes them apart, the two of them looking instinctively towards the doorway. A second later, Harry stumbles in and grabs two beers from the fridge. He’s hunched over and rooting around for a third, not even looking at Liam or Zayn or the distance between them, and he says, “What are you two doing in here?”  
  
“Nothing,” Zayn says, but his fingers are playing with the hem of Liam’s shirt and a smile is stretched so wide across his face, and Liam thinks,  _Something._

  


End file.
